How the Failure to Redistrict Has Shaped Indian Politics

For generations, Congress [the dominant political party] politicians have focused heavily on the rural electorate, in part because a 30-year freeze on redistricting kept the number of urban constituencies artificially low, said K.C. Sivaramakrishnan, co-author of “A Handbook of Urbanization in India.”

“There is a certain political attitude which has been there for a long time — that rural is good, rural is simple, rural is plain, rural is beautiful,” Mr. Sivaramakrishnan said, a belief that harks back to Mohandas K. Gandhi, who venerated villages as the ideal expression of human civilization.